


Velcro

by Arazsya



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 13:35:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13055046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arazsya/pseuds/Arazsya
Summary: In hindsight, the pub had been a bad idea. Tim should have known. If not from the second he’d had the idea, then when Sasha had dropped out, saying something about this new boyfriend of hers, or even when he’d gone to get himself a drink while he waited for the others, and he’dseenthe barman he recognised decide not to ask about his scars.





	Velcro

**Author's Note:**

  * For [butterflymind](https://archiveofourown.org/users/butterflymind/gifts).



> Set at the earlier end of S2, pre-intervention but post-stalking. Things got quite angsty, I'm sorry.

In hindsight, the pub had been a bad idea. Tim should have known. If not from the second he’d had the idea, then when Sasha had dropped out, saying something about this new boyfriend of hers, or even when he’d gone to get himself a drink while he waited for the others, and he’d _seen_ the barman he recognised decide not to ask about his scars.

It hadn’t been too late, then, to call the whole thing off. It would have taken seconds, barely a line of texting, and he’d considered it. Fished his phone out of his pocket, unlocked it, stared at his contacts list until the screen went black again, wasn’t sure why he’d let it.

Perhaps it wasn’t about knowing that the pub was a bad idea, so much as it was about accepting that the pub was a bad idea. And he hadn’t. Couldn’t. Yet. Understood it in his head, but couldn’t act on it. Part of his brain stopped him, the same part that said, firmly but quietly, _maybe you won’t die_ , and _maybe everything can still be like it was_. The part that sounded enough like Martin that sometimes he just wanted to hear it talk, and other times he wanted to scream at it until it _understood_.

Didn’t matter now anyway. The seconds had ticked past too late, and Tim tried not to count them, not to wonder if he’d appreciated before how long they took.

He looked up from his drink, and his eyes met those of another man across the pub. The man didn’t blink. Just watched, gaze so steady that it was possible to consider the anatomy of his eyeballs, sort them into pupil and iris and sclera, see the components instead of the whole. He didn’t seem hostile. There was no twitch on his face to indicate something trying to get out, and no cold to its stillness. It wasn’t like being judged or considered in any way, and still Tim had to smooth his hands away from fists.

He dropped his attention down again, slowly, something in his stomach shifting uncomfortably as he caught himself thinking that it would have been better if Martin had been there. Martin, who was sitting right next to him, so close that whenever Tim reached for his glass, the velcro on his jacket would snatch at Martin’s jumper. The wool stretched alarmingly, but Tim pretended that he hadn’t noticed, and neither of them detached it.

Not that Martin was exactly _present_. He just sat there, alternating between watching the door and trying not to watch the door.

“He’s not coming,” Tim said, after swallowing his first six comments. He still couldn’t keep the sour note from his voice. Not that he really tried. “He barely came before Prentiss, he’s hardly going to come now he thinks we’re all murderers.” If he hadn’t been sure of that, he never would have agreed when Martin had asked if he could invite him.

“I thought it might do him some good to get out of the Archives,” Martin said. “And he just needs some time.”

_Because that’s what matters. What’s good for Jon. Not you or me or anyone else_.

Martin was looking away from the door now, but still not at Tim, as if he were emitting some kind of repulsive force. Probably for the best. The things he wasn’t saying were written clearly over his face, and as much as he disagreed with Martin about everything, he didn’t want to spend the whole night fighting about Jon again, retracing arguments they’d had too many times by now, sheep tracks trodden into scars on the landscape. Martin would press for understanding and Tim would insist that there were some things he wasn’t obliged to understand. Tonight, there were other issues that he needed to find a way of bringing up.

A part of him still wanted to snap, to say that if the only reason that Martin was here was for Jon, then they might as well both just leave. But that would give him sixty-forty odds in favour of seeing the sad puppy look that Martin was apparently unaware he was even capable of doing. And then he’d have to go back to his empty home, despair at it, consider getting a pet for several hours just to fill the space, decide against it because the damn thing would probably be sad when he died, then go to bed and try to sleep through dreams that squirmed.

It wasn’t appealing. But neither was sitting there listening to the Jonathan Sims Defence Squad for the next however many hours. Tim had no idea where he had even got the idea that they were supposed to be supportive of Jon. Maybe it was just residual guilt from leaving them behind in the tunnels, but then at least some of it should be applying to him as well. It wasn’t that he was jealous, exactly, but every word Martin said on the subject stung like a hailstone. When he talked about what Jon had gone through, it was with sympathy. When it was about what Tim had gone through, it was as a way of forestalling an argument. All of his insistence that everything was going to be OK seemed to rely on an awful lot from Tim, and very little from Jon, which implied that he was somehow in the wrong, left more clouds of resentment in his head. The anger would chase itself around his brain in the small hours, and by the time that morning came, he would have even less patience for Jon, watching him over that damn tape recorder.

It wasn’t as if Martin’s particular brand of help was going to solve anything anyway. As far as Tim could tell, it involved a lot of tea, and Martin worrying about someone else when he should probably have been worrying about himself. Jon needed an official reprimand, possibly a punch in the face, and for someone to tell him that if any of them had meant him any harm, they could have left him for the worms.

Across the pub, the man was still staring. Tim could tell without looking up. Underneath his jacket, he could feel the rush of heat across his back. A few months ago, he might have gone over, asked the man what his problem was, but there was something in the slackness of the man’s face and the lack of creases in his coat that told him not to. He tried to angle his attention away, but he was familiar enough with the sensation of being watched (sitting, hated, at the backs of his teeth) that he still knew when it was happening.

That was what the urge to sling his arm around Martin’s shoulders was. All it was. A distraction. And the knowledge that public displays of affection often make people uncomfortable enough to avert their eyes.

He didn’t do it. Wasn’t drunk enough, and Martin was still rambling on about how Jon was _going through a lot and needed their help_ , or something.

Instead, he hunched against the man’s gaze, and wondered whether this was going to be the place, the time, that it happened. That something came for him, or for Martin, or for both of them. He wondered which of them it would be first, if Jon was still going to be suspecting them of murder when he stood over their corpses, whether he’d regret any of it.

Perhaps the man watching would stand from his table, move across the room faster than either of them could understand, without even stirring the surface of the drinks. And then neither of them would be there anymore, and the Magnus Institute would be taking statements from everyone in the room. Years from now, another archivist would disbelieve them, and other assistants would be trying to follow up on their deaths.

And they were going to die. All of them. Tim was certain of that much. The issue simmering somewhere in his intestines was whether or not to tell Martin. He half-wished he didn’t know it himself, and it wasn’t something he wanted to inflict on Martin, not even when he’d apparently assigned himself the moral duty of taking Jon’s side, because even then, when he’d walked into the pub, he’d sat down right next to Tim without hesitation, smiled at him, and hadn’t stared at the scars. But maybe knowing what was coming might help him survive a little longer. And Martin still had a right to know. They all had, should have been told something, anything, about the Institute’s mortality rate before they had taken their jobs, if Elias was even aware of it.

Tim wouldn’t have found it himself, but after Prentiss, Elias and everyone else in the building just seemed to move past it, going on like nothing had happened, left him feeling that he had somehow lived a different timeline. The only way it was really possible to tell that anything had gone wrong at all was to look at the Archives team in isolation. It was like everyone else was numb to attacks from supernatural creatures, like it happened all the time, and, eventually, during his long convalescent hours, he had looked into it.

He wasn’t Sasha. He couldn’t charm computers the way he could people, but even he had still been able to find the long, _long_ string of obituaries all connected by the Magnus Institute. The causes of death had been sanitised, but reading into that was part of Tim’s job, and, even if he couldn’t glean the specifics he could have from a pathologist’s report, he could tell enough to know that none of them had gone from old age.

His skin had twitched with the sensation of something burrowing underneath it, the involuntary jerk of a muscle against something twisting past it, and he had known. He hadn’t been surprised, or even all that angry, at first. There had just been the acceptance of a fact that he had already half-known since Prentiss’ attack. The Archives were going to kill him and Martin and Sasha, it was just a matter of when and how unpleasant.

If it happened here, now, he wouldn’t have to spend another hour listening to Martin talking about Jon and wondering whether Martin would be more inclined to consider his point of view if he kissed him. Not that that was something he wanted to do. It wasn’t something he had considered before, just an idea that had crept in in the middle of one of their arguments, when the realisation that he’d never really seen Martin standing up for anything before had bloomed into his head, and along with it, the thought that he quite liked the fervour.

And if he hadn’t done the best of jobs at blotting the concept of kissing Martin out of his head, it was because it had been a while since he’d kissed anyone. Impending death had put a damper on relationships as much as it had on dog-owning (and he was only considering that because he liked the way Martin’s entire being lit up when he saw them, damnit). Martin was just him missing connection, and trying to forge it with someone else in the same situation.

That was why every time Martin smiled at him or offered to get him a cup of tea, something in his throat caved in. And even if it wasn’t, nothing was going to come of it, because Martin already had a full-time occupation worrying about Jon.

At least the commentary on how it would all be all right if they could just do another pub quiz together (probably something about working as a team, and while they were a very good quiz team, Tim was in no mood to be part of one) had finally lapsed into silence.

“Martin,” Tim said, solid and serious. He hadn’t planned where to go after it, and he could feel himself falling over the edge of the name into a stew of options and unfocussed anger. On the other side of the pub, the man was still there, and Tim’s flesh itched with the concept of someone else’s awareness.

“Tim?” Martin replied, and he had so much stupid hope on his face, like he really thought he could help, was helping.

Tim hesitated, managed something that might have looked like a smile but felt like he was about to start spitting teeth. He tapped Martin on the back of one hand, so briefly that he almost doesn’t feel how warm Martin’s skin was compared to his, and pointed past him.

“Dog,” he said, and Martin twisted around so fast that Tim’s velcro ripped away from his jumper, leaving a couple of grey threads behind. It wasn’t the most impressive dog in the world, dozing softly, half-under its owner’s barstool, ears all over the place and blotchy fur running in different directions, but from the smile on Martin’s face, he could almost believe it was some soft stumbling puppy.

At the bar, the bell rang for the end of the night, and when Tim looked back towards the man’s table, he was gone. He frowned, glanced around looking for him, but Martin moved into his field of vision, most of his attention still on the dog as its owner roused it. He still looked happy, and what was Tim supposed to do now? Interrupt that with _by the way, we’re all going to die soon_?

He would tell Martin tomorrow, he decided, or the day after, or whenever he could do it without turning Martin into him.


End file.
